The performance is supported by the Danish Ministry of Culture Development Fund, The Danish Art Foundation, The Beckett-Foundation, Copenhagen Cultural Foundation, The Tuborg Foundation and Ambassade de France au Danemark, Service Culturel.

Børsen (DK)The ‘Site Seeing Zoom’ performance erases the boundary between theatre performance and pictorial art fetched from the Internet. The performance is innovative and deeply fascinating in all its cool distance from the audience.
– Lars WredstrømRead the full review here

Jyllandsposten (DK)… Kirsten Dehlholm and Crosscross, a French group of artists and designers, exploit images and surfaces in such a masterly way that they
almost change form and figure while the perspectives are displaced and changed all along.
– Henrik Lyding Read the full review here

Kultunaut (DK)… The artistic form of the performance is experimentally and revolutionary new – it is not to be read or understood as traditional works – and the intention is not to let the spectator be able to follow the immense flow of images and sound – or to be able to remember every single detail. The zoom-function is the leitmotif of the performance and the scenography, the cross of the screens, encourages the audience to go on ‘site seeing’ – to choose their own perspective on the performance, their own way through the digital space.
– Marie Louise BüchertRead the full review here

Extracts from the performance text by Morten Søndergaard
(Translated by John Irons)

Old man
I didn’t care for my mother’s milk,
it tasted bitter and it was too salt.
Now she can’t recognise me any more.
Everything is virtual
she cries smiling
when the pot plant hits the scull.

I moved to the end of the world.

I would dearly like to be a worthy human being,
but I don’t know how to set about.
I was the one that used to cut,
but the anaesthesia is gone,
and my shadow is full of bones.

She was a wave of skin
that broke against me.

There she stood covered with dust
and whispered: Forgetmenot.

It’s women who remember.

I would dearly like to be a worthy human being,
but I don’t know how to set about.

My years are a darkness of trivial things.

I am the next one.

Boy
I am a beginning,
but what was there
before it all began?

Why did I get the face I got?
What does it mean to be a human being?

Keep me warm.
Give me something to eat.

Tell me everything.

Wounded man
Tell me it’s just a dream.
There is war everywhere.

No, it finished a long time ago.

Where was it I came from?
Now it is now.
Not now, but now.
And now. And now.

It is not a dream.

The keepers asked me about the attack
and I answered the best I could:
The soldiers came flying
on swans over the sea.
I think that we marched through a forest.

I love you,
love you,
love you.

Today it’s my birthday.
I wonder how old I am.

Help me to become a human being again.

I am firmly convinced we are making love.

Young man
I am counting
every thing in the world.
I say their names one by one.
I am a living stone in the desert,
a star beneath the skin,
a handful of sand in a bottle
a handful of sand in a bottle.

voices in evening-dark city, chamber music,
the smell of warm summer air,
the perpetual motion machine,
the rainbow, the evil of children,
a drop of blood from the nose of the flayed rabbit,
the Milky Way, twigs on a path in a wood,
your parents skeletons,
trees lit up by car headlights, cockroaches,
lilies, icebergs, caresses,
silence, smoke,
kisses from soft deformed mouthparts,
my brain while I’m asleep.

A collaboration between Hotel Pro Forma and the digital art collective Crosscross (France).

The non-linear structure of the network reflects the complex nature of human memory. The performance uses the digital media as tool and as artistic idiom.

Site Seeing Zoom reflects the interplay of man and computer and rejoices at the diversity of the world. We search in the storage of our common memory of the network. The performance abandons itself to the rediscovered material and invents new stories in a constant change between foreground and background, fragment and unity, precision and causal.

Like hovering pilots we travel in the landscape of memory, zoom in and out, change angle, speed and height. We map and catalogue human ways of expression. We use the navigation in a virtual architecture as the composition and the narrative style of the performance. The movements of the travel are projected on screens as sequences of images that are doubled, reflected, and repeated like living memory itself. The audience walks round the cross-structure of the screens and experience the performance from different angles.

Four people, four voices function as portals to the digital universe, as narrators and as representatives of different memory processes. Their stories are written as poems and as statements about life as lived.

What is a worthy human being? They ask from a room in the digital palace.

A guide finds himself between the physical and the virtual world. He is seen as movement, as shadow, and as scale in relation to the projected images.

The sound moves spatially from the one sequence to the other. At the same time, the sound is a landscape and a runway for the four narrators and their guide.

The interplay between the movement of the journey, the signaling of the guide, the position of the audience together with the bodily sound – make the performance.

Duration 66 min.

Lecture series

Based on Site Seeing Zoom Hotel Pro Forma arranged a lecture series:Albert Gjedde, professor, The BrainMap-Centre, Aarhus University Hospital, discusses the latest brain research results of the consciousness and the memory, as well as the brain research view on the psyche.

Lars Qvortrup, professor, Department of Interactive Media, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, talks about the possibilities of art in a digitilized aesthetic universe with focus on the interference between image and media.

Morten Søndergaard, poet, tells about his work with the texts for Site Seeing Zoom – about the poetic investigations of the many-faceted imaginations of the memory and the brain.